By William Bole

When word came of jets crashing into the twin towers, I was at my desk at home drafting a report about forgiveness and international conflict resolution, a notion that would seem precarious even in less dangerous times.

Oblivious to the scale of the catastrophe and the cascading irony of my theme, I kept my head down and dug into case studies of forgiveness around the world. That I might be onto an idea whose time had passed almost as soon as it arrived did not set in until I heard the next day from two friends and 
a cousin who had seen the horror in Lower Manhattan. They were not forgiving.

Is it purely imaginary to think of an international strategy that deploys forgiveness in the post-World Trade Center era?

Forgiveness is by no means a traditional value in world affairs. The concept is foreign to most secular political philosophies and peripheral at best to Christian theories of the common good and a just war. Among 20th century philosophers, the German-Jewish refugee Hanna Arendt stood out. Writing after the Holocaust, she saw forgiveness as one of two human 
capacities that make it possible to alter the political future. The other is the ability to enter into covenants.

It is not that forgiveness has been a no-show in the wide world. It surfaced after the grisly nightmare of apartheid in South Africa, when then-president Nelson Mandela awakened many to a reality expressed later in 
the title of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's 1999 book, "No Future without Forgiveness."

Pope John Paul II has made forgiveness a peacemaking theme, as has the Community of St. Egidio, a Rome-based Catholic lay organization that performs 
charitable works. Most remarkably, the community mediated an end to the Mozambique civil war in 1992.

As these illustrate, forgiveness is not necessarily a discrete transaction between two individuals. It is also a social process that blends elements such as truth, empathy, forbearance from revenge, and the will to eventually reconcile. That is according to a definition by the contemporary social ethicist Donald W. Shriver, Jr.

Nevertheless, there is scant place for such sentiment in the reigning doctrines of statecraft. So-called "realists" normally scoff at the idea of fractious peoples reaching beyond their group interests and horizons, which is the transcendent quality of social forgiveness. But transcend we must.

For us in the United States, forgiving those responsible for the slaughter of September 11 is nearly unthinkable. But what of the wider populations from which these terrorists came with their desperate hatred of the United States? Could we afford not to embark on a journey of forgiveness and reconciliation with these communities?

To start with, we should realize forgiveness in this light is never about forgetting. It is about remembering in a certain way, as the South Africans chose to do in establishing a truth commission after apartheid. Forgiveness is not a denial of human responsibility: rather it rests on the moral judgment that an act was wrong. Forgiveness is compatible with justice, never with vengeance. As Hanna Arendt said, human beings cannot forgive what they cannot punish.

Perhaps in our period of grief we have seen subtle openings to forgiveness. Some Islamic leaders in this country have acknowledged they need to ask how some Muslims are getting the message that taking thousands of innocent lives is not only justifiable but the path to Paradise. President Bush asked early on why people anywhere would want to see such a thing happen 
to the United States. Questions like that could give a closer view of why untold millions resent America's overpowering world presence.

This might not seem the moment for introspection, but somehow we need to reflect even as we resist. A forgiveness strategy is not incompatible with 
bringing terrorists and their sponsors to justice or perhaps even smoking them out of their havens. But it defies the illusion that we could be delivered from this crisis by soldiers and spies above all.

After some personal reflection, I am back writing that report about forgiveness and conflict resolution, convinced once more that there really is 
no future without forgiveness. 

William Bole is an associate fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in Washington. The center sponsors the project, 
"Forgiveness in Conflict Resolution: Reality and Utility." A longer version of this article appears in the October 12, 2001 issue of National Catholic Reporter.